


Fresh Paint

by MilkshakeKate



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Domestic Disputes, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Happy Ending, Porn with Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-08-31 23:56:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8598904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilkshakeKate/pseuds/MilkshakeKate
Summary: A little home improvement never hurt anybody.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Look at the length of this. Ridiculous. Uploading at silly o'clock, and with so many messages left to respond to! Please accept my apologies!! I've had a maddening day at work, and I neeeeeed to throw one of my WIPs into the void to take my mind off it!!!! I promise to be good as soon as I come home tomorrow and get back to you all. In the meantime: yet more indulgent and decadent nonsense for your consideration, best wishes xxx

Illya glares at the wall with a scrutiny he usually reserves for interrogations.  

“It will look better when it’s dry,” Gaby says, handing him a fresh cup of tea. 

She has her doubts.  

“Hmm.”  

“You said you trusted me.”  

“Yes,” he says, evidently regretting it, and spares her a glance from the corner of his eye. He sips from the mug. When she glowers back, he huffs through the rising steam, “You have interesting taste in decor.”  

And in men, thinks Gaby, for how uncommonly invested Illya has been in the decorating of her flat. 

With a week of down time before being stationed in Kraków, it’s the perfect time to give Gaby’s apartment the attention it so desperately needs. She had expected the flat would feel like home by now, a year into her official migration. It doesn’t. Even with all the chic furniture and accoutrements — Waverly’s reparations, having tossed her whole life to the flames in East Berlin —  it still feels like a hotel. Everything about the place is temporary. From the lack of artwork she daren’t hang on the walls to the refrigerator door opening from the wrong side, it works against her. 

In the same way, she is unsettled by the sporadic coming-and-going of Illya, whose visits occur in three hour increments but rarely any longer, as if he can sense the building’s volatility towards hosting an Ossi German and her suitor, this Russian as red as its capital’s buses.  

At least, this is how Gaby prefers to think of Illya’s absence. That it is circumstance, rather than reluctance.

She wants to wake up to him in the morning.

They have talked about this.

The wintry London chill seeps through her bedroom window, cracked open for the fumes when progress was at its peak. The initial work-sweat of painting has worn off since Illya halted work to deliberate, in his way, on whether any idea but his own could even be worth considering.   

The damp paint does look a little sallow in the light of the bare ceiling bulb; more of a pallid flesh than _strawberry cream_. Illya had suggested a fashionable mint. Gaby had grimaced. No, it will be blush pink, and her armada of cushions and swathes of bedding will be in any colour and texture she desires, thank you. 

But at this rate these plans will only ever be wishful thinking. Her queen-sized mattress is currently slumped unglamorously on the floor, smothered in dust sheets. The bed frame is still in a thousand pieces in the hall, with all the slats leaning up against the wall as they have for the past five nights. 

It has made for some interesting nights sleep. Illya, naturally, had been present only until she fell asleep, before untangling himself and skulking off to his own flat to stretch, thaw out. 

 _Cold feet?_ Gaby had joked sleepily, but he hadn’t known this idiom. 

Or perhaps it was only safer to ignore it.  

“This was a mistake,” Illya decides. He pushes the hot tea back into her hands to gather up the palettes, and all the brushes clatter in their half-empty pots.  He collapses the ladder he'd brought with him, never having needed it — with a roller in hand he had walked the length of the room and whitewashed the low ceiling with ease.  “We should not have done this.” 

“Oh, not _this_ again.”  

Illya shakes his head.  He has already showered to rid himself of this morning’s mistake — mustard yellow, a horrible attempt at compromise — and so his hair flops about with it.  

“It's really not that bad.”

“No. We must start over.”  

“Illya." Gaby sets the tea down so she won't throw at him. "I have already lost a metre of floor space with the number of coats you have layered on that wall. I'm not doing this again.”  

“You want this done well—”  

“I just want it done!”  

“Then tomorrow I will go to hardware store—”  

“No!” She swats him with a _fwap_ of her brush.  

Illya flinches back from the wound; a streak of cold, wet paint down the length of his forearm, creamy rose pink.  

“Gaby…” 

“No,” she says again, but lower, and directly to that look in his eyes.   

He’s taking her in with strategy, with intent, and she knows she should have worn something else to paint in. Something expensive, something he likes. But she’s doomed. Wearing it like a dress brushing halfway down her thighs, it’s his most hated garment — a tongue-in-cheek gift of Solo’s to Illya from a seafront stall in Miami. A tourist’s t-shirt, an effort to make him seem less viciously Russian, all pale and scowling and sweating in the heat of the boardwalk. But no! It had been an insult to Illya’s skill as a covert operative. He had almost stuffed the gaudy thing down a storm drain before Gaby snatched it out of his hands, vowed low in his ear that she would wear it to bed.   

And she has.  

If luck is on her side, Illya will see it as a monument of their rocky early courtship and spare her.   

“Apologise.”  

The polythene sheets rustle as she steps back. “No.”  

He stalks after her. Wielding a paintbrush himself, he taps the metal band on his bicep. Looking like a vengeful menace has never been a real challenge for Illya. 

However, the effect is lessened by him smelling faintly of her soap and her shampoo, and by the soft stretch of his undershirt and the freshness of his face, so warm and clean so soon after his shower. 

“Illya,” she tries, because he tends to soften when she says his name. “Let’s finish this and go to bed.”  

“To the mattress,” he corrects.  

“And whose fault is that?”  

She’s against the wall now, her back to the patchy mustard yellow of this morning. Gaby feels around on the folding table, keeping her eye on him. She palms blindly over abandoned tins of paint and cling-filmed brushes, stained a thousand different colours for a thousand failed attempts.   

At last she grabs an edging brush, half-dry with white gloss, and holds it behind her back.  

He is a master of looming. From here she can see all the little speckles of his ceiling painting, having pushed the roller too quickly. The white dots dapple his cheekbones; flat matte constellations around his eyes, his nose, his brow, which is furrowing so deeply now.  

But there is play in him.  

“I will be glad to be rid of this shirt,” he mutters, brandishing the brush like a knife and crossing it through the air in front of her.   

Gaby gives him a dimpled smile. She peels the big t-shirt over her head and throws it to safety on the mattress. Then she adopts her dancer's posture, mismatching underwear and all, and she challenges him not to look. 

Illya rolls his eyes so she lunges — but he ducks, quick to pin her wrists up in one hand and paint a wide, wet stroke across her bare belly with the other.  

“Illya!”  

“Now we are even.”  

Goosebumps prickle up her body. Gaby writhes out of his grip, strikes a big fat white line down the middle of his undershirt with all that’s left on the bristles. 

Before she can blink Illya crowds her flat against the wall. He wipes the wet paint dripping down his arm and grabs at her waist with it —  she flinches under the press of all his fingers, for the squelch of paint between them. 

And when she scowls up at him he’s laughing. Laughing. She catches the flash of his teeth and the crinkle of his eyes as she stipples her paintbrush into his ribs. He is either ticklish or he’s mocking her. For his own life, it had better be the former.

“Finish. My. Wall,” she threatens, and she stabs again.   

She meets his eye in the little space they’ve pushed themselves into. It’s like looking up to the roof of a cave, the wet drip of the paint and the chill of his fingers, and how he casts shadows. How he swamps her whole field of vision, huge and fathomless.

Gaby's chest is heaving for the scuffle and, when he notices, Illya's laughter fades into a small smile, taking her in. His fingertips knead into her waist, the slight curve of her hip. 

"Or else?"   

Gaby snaps out of his spell and throws down her brush. She shoves his undershirt up his torso, the gloss drying and crackling into the cotton as it goes. It streaks the tip of his nose and through his hair, sticking it up with a flicker of aged, silvery white, but when he emerges his expression is young, and soft.

He waits for her to answer him.  

So she smears his paint from her belly and she strikes him back. She presses into the cut of his bare stomach and slides up to his chest, slaps him there hard, though he only gives a little huff of surprise. Her fingers and thumb leave five pink prints on him, both in paint and with the sharp smack of her palm. Gaby trails over Illya’s chest. She understands how he could laugh after doing such a thing to her. Leaving a shadow; laying down the path a touch has taken long after it’s over. It is a powerful thing.  

Illya ducks to kiss her stern mouth, thumb beneath her chin and smudging the paint there too. He’s warm. When he looms like this, overwhelming and embarrassing her, she wants to push him away but hold on too, keep him at arm’s length while radiating as he does. He squeezes her waist and she wonders if he can feel every goosebump as well as she can.

“You would like me to finish painting,” he murmurs. 

“Yes,” she mutters, with contempt, and she flattens both palms over the paint matted into his chest. “In a minute.”  

His thoughtful hum ripples under her fingers. And then he’s lifting her, his body a broad pressure between her thighs and his two paint-lathered hands spreading her up against the wall.

Gaby manages a glare of a smile, steadies herself with two arms around his neck. It is dizzying to be so high up so quickly. Worse yet, Illya soon holds her there by only the press of his hips, both hands taking instead to the clasps of her brassiere.   

“Illya.” Gaby wriggles, ducking away from his kiss. “Illya, the paint...”  

He wipes his hand on the wall and pretends to dry it off on the small of her back, which earns him a fierce little look.  

“Sorry,” he mumbles, amused, and gentles the straps down to her elbows to have her shrug them off. He teases her nipples under his thumbs until her mouth goes dry and her legs start to ache, before he scoots her higher with a jolt of his hips.

The wall is a shock against her skin, and Illya’s hands are even colder. She seeks the heat of his chest, shivers under his warmer tongue, and wishes she could close the window to keep all of it to herself. Her blood is rushing to her head, her chest so light and shallow like this — the fumes, the vapour of oil and pigment. It makes her sensitive, and greedy. 

Feeling his need pushing up against her thigh isn’t helping.  

"Gaby—" Illya breathes into her neck, holding tighter.  

She nods and nods and nods, catching his mouth with hers. 

All her resolve is melting into the base of her spine and the cradle of her hips, her grudge becoming a hunger. It will come back. Once she has come undone in his hands she’ll remember. Like getting used to her apartment, Illya’s… physicality ought to have worn off by now; become familiar and predictable and unsurprising. It hasn’t. Even after all this time she still can’t keep her hands off him. 

The sentiment seems mutual. Illya toys with the seams of her underwear around her thighs, tracing with his fingertips. 

The first time he’d tried this touch they had been cooped up in a dusty safe house in Paris. Illya, kneeling to pick up the chessboard she’d upended to take its place. And Gaby, certainly drunk, curving his searching palms over her thighs instead. 

She kisses him now, tastes the same push of the tongue he’d kept so close back then. 

When she told him she wanted him, he'd confessed she was the first to inspire him like this. The first woman he had wanted to be with. And he groaned into her neck when she pulled him there, called her an enemy to the KGB, their sole competition for the use of his body and mind. Still does say this, when the moment strikes him. It is her favourite thing to tease him about.

She suspects now that he had also been a little drunk, that night in Paris.

The memory is enough to have Gaby grip a little tighter, both covetous and unsteady as it rushes to her head. She will always be overwhelmed like this. 

An embarrassing gasp escapes her when he slips his touch where she needs it, thumbing over the dampening fabric. She breathes the rest of her moan into his neck. Her world focuses in on that touch and the rest fades out, meaningless. 

Illya holds her to the wall in one arm and coaxes with the other, more curious than anything, teasing aimlessly. 

All evening she has watched him reach up and stretch; the shift of his shoulders, his muscled back under cotton, bending to tug at dust sheets. Tilting his chin high to study the ceiling. Throat bare, chest taut. Covering the walls with broad sweeps and employing delicate strokes in tighter corners, ever the perfectionist. 

He had scolded her for staring. Despite Illya being insufferably indifferent about his features, Gaby isn’t convinced it hasn’t been a calculated seduction. Now, as she squeezes his shoulders with every roll of his fingertips over her, she doesn’t care if it is. She has been ready for him since he came back from the store with that tin of pink paint. 

Illya’s lips spread over her neck, groaning for the insistent squeeze of her thighs around his waist. He’s lost. The hand on her back is firm, dipping into the curve of her spine and kneading there, and she’s sure that if she just... If she could only...  

Gaby plants one foot on the wall and shoves. 

Illya staggers with a grunt, wraps a protective arm around her head to collapse miles and miles down to the mattress with a shuddering jolt. 

And it’s a tangle of limbs, Gaby sliding out of his grip only to be dragged back by an ankle, flipped over, pinned, but she wrestles out of it, too small to be captured by all four corners.   

“Come here,” he tries, but its apologetic gentleness is tinged with intent, more of a dare with that sharp look in his eyes.  

“Lie down,” Gaby counters, crawling away from him. With his knees spread he is sitting back on his heels, paint supplies scattered all over the dust sheets. He’s a vista. Gaby sweeps the mess onto the floor to bare the mattress, throws a long leg out in front of her to push into his thigh with her toes.  

Illya stares at her. She stretches to become a tempting sight but he is well versed in pretending not to look at things. He knows how to act like he doesn’t want an indulgence laid bare for him to take.   

Not the case for Gaby. It’s difficult to meet his eye when he’s sitting like that, trying to hide his deep breathing. And with all that paint on his skin begging to be wiped away, to be traced dry…

Gaby kneads higher up his thigh with the ball of her foot and he grabs it to still her. He doesn’t move. So she scoots closer, meeting him, and because he doesn’t bite she climbs into his lap to sit on the bulge of his cock with a satisfied little hum.  

“Compromise,” she says, low. 

“You have had your way tonight.”  

Gaby likes him like this. “Why, Illya. You want to have your way with me?”  

He smiles dully, because this is her game, and nothing he can say will save him.  

“Tonight I want to be on top. Your way is just the same, isn’t it?” Gaby pushes a hand hard against his chest but he resists, sitting upright out of sheer will. If he wants to fight like this, fine. She knows her strengths. She takes to his belt buckle instead, running her thumb under it, grazing his skin. “Don’t you like it when I ride you into the floor?”  

That gets him. She catches the traitorous pulse of his arousal on the back of her thigh, but he'd known it was coming. Illya’s only rebuttal is to firm his grip on her waist. 

Closer to the window now, the chilly breeze draws a shiver out of her. It peaks her nipples to tighten against Illya’s chest, and he shifts against her for it. The heat seeps through the slim fabric of her underwear and she grinds down on him to numb the ache. His pleased rumble sends another thrill straight down her spine, and a promising curl of heat even lower.

“There will be plenty of time for the wall,” Gaby assures him, freeing his buckle with one hand and caressing his cheek with the other.  “That is, once you have finished painting it.”  

 “And plenty of time for the bed once it is assembled.” Illya rocks up, the bold line of his cock slipping between her thighs. “No?”  

Gaby stares at him. Her lips part but nothing smart will fall out of them. 

And that stunned silence only makes him brave. Illya wets the tips of two fingers in his mouth before gentling them into her underwear. He smiles for how Gaby’s hips cant into him without thinking. “You think I will not make you come, holding you there?” 

She wants to take his lower lip between her teeth and bite.  

“You’ve been practising,” she manages instead, eyes fluttering closed.

“Hm?” 

“When I speak to you like that-t—” Gaby starts, gasps. His touch brushes over her clit, circling light and slow. She drops her forehead to his shoulder to breathe an angry sigh. “Y-you used to blush… Blushed like a virgin when I spoke to you like that, Illya, the first time. Have you practised?” 

Illya watches himself touching her. “It is good to master opponent’s reserve tactic when their routine grows weak.” 

“Weak?” she starts. Then, gathering herself, “Routine!”

Illya smiles, pacifying, and strengthens the arm wrapped around her back. “I think now, yes. Weak like this. For this. Stubborn always.” 

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Gaby mutters. She tugs at his wrist to better meet the pressure building inside her, the pull. The confession falls out easily after that, “So stubborn, Illya. I think… I think you hate every colour on the wall so you don’t have to finish painting it. S-so it’s never finished.” 

He peers up at her beneath his lashes. “What do you mean?” 

Gaby swallows. “I mean. You probably just don’t want to be so… close.” And it truly does fall out then. The bravery slips off her tongue as readily as the strength seeps out of her legs. “You don’t want to see your things in this room, so you won’t paint it. And the longer you leave it…? Well. You will always be in the hallway. Like my bed.” 

Illya slows, then stops. She makes a frustrated little noise but she knows what she has said. She can't look him in the eye. It’s a confession too rare for Illya to dismiss it as another jab, another counter in this game. 

He holds her still as she wriggles into him. “You believe this?” 

“It doesn’t matter.” She huffs out a sigh, pushes back her hair. “I like living by myself. I only thought, because I asked you such a long time ago to think about it… and you won’t stay overnight... maybe you don’t want to. That’s fine. It's not as if I care or anything.” 

Now he’s frowning so deeply that Gaby regrets wanting anything more than to have fun with him. 

“I want it to be right,” says Illya. He eventually gives a single nod of conviction, liking the way it sounds.

“Well, you don’t want _strawberry cream_.” 

“Perhaps it will grow on me.” He shrugs. “After all, I did not like you.” 

“And I hated you.” 

She’s too embarrassed to kiss the remorseful little curl off his lips. She’s struck by how much she wants to; by how the man to chase her out of East Berlin is the same man to dry her dishes, steal her shampoo, kiss her into sleep.

How much she would like him to do that every day.

“I would like to be with you for a long time,” Illya says. He holds her gaze until she meets it, and won’t let it drop. “Good foundation and skilled labour yields lasting results.” 

“The paint is so important to you?”

“You are important to me.”

Gaby scoffs, rolls her eyes, though she doesn’t mean to at all. She doesn’t know what else to do. It hammers away in her body, too strong. She has never heard those words aloud before. From anybody. From Illya it sinks in like a warm tincture, like a burn soothing, healing. She hasn’t felt such relief since leaving East Germany, nor such doomed longing since the first time she felt homesick for it.

Her voice isn’t steady yet, so she passes it off with a nervous laugh. “Only you could recite some… some _manifesto_ with your hand in my knickers.”

But Illya pulls her into his chest. He holds her tight to ground her there. His neck is warm against hers, and so calm. When she can gather herself Gaby threads her fingers into the back of his hair and wraps an arm around him too.

Has she ever told him that? That he’s so important to her that she can’t think straight? She knows better than to scold him when he doesn’t check in at HQ, or if he’s MIA, or if he disappears, sometimes, for weeks at a time — because he does. He disappears often, and she does too. But does it really frighten him as much as it does her, the thought of him never coming back? It is very important to her that he exists, and continues to do so, even at arm’s reach. 

“Gaby?” he tries, when she has been quiet for too long.

Gaby firmly kisses his cheek and works her way back to his mouth, peppering him all over. She can’t stop herself. There is feeling in every one of them, pouring out. He meets her with a sigh and he lets her push him down. He lets her lay him on his back and hurriedly unbutton him, strip him bare and fall back on top, her own underwear dropped in a twist on the floor with his.

His broad palms round over her and he pulls her along his length, rolling her down heavily and losing his moan in the crown of her hair. 

“Illya,” she breathes into his chest. She wants to see him. “Sit up. Sit up.”

He huffs and edges up the mattress with her, back to the wall where a headboard ought to be. Before she can sit back on his thighs he pulls her to kneel up. He crosses her slight breasts in kisses and makes marks with his teeth, fading the same pink as the paint he’d left on her skin. 

Illya pulls back and thinks for a moment, fingers twitching on her hips. When he's this still, her pulse beats like a drum. Hurry up! Hurry up! You could go any minute! When he slows, when he isn't touching her, it feels like wasted time. She fears he can hear her desperate heart thumping away. She should press her palm to his chest to feel for his, to see if it beats just the same for her. It would ease her doubts.  

But before she can, Illya lifts her up by the waist to stand in front of him on her own two feet. Then he trails up her calf and sweeps under her thigh, lifts it over his shoulder until he’s inches away from the warm wetness between her legs.

“ _Gott_ —”

Illya’s breath ghosts over her. “You will let me to stay tonight?”

She frowns hard and nods, mindless. How could he doubt her desire to have him here? She has confessed as much. He must be able to taste her so close, smell the heat of her need, if not hear her heart. She nods for far too long, and looks down to find Illya’s blue eyes peering back. Gaby scratches her fingers through his hair and she could cry out for it, everything too much.

“ _Yes_ ,” she manages. “You don’t have to ask.”

He nods. “Thank you.”

Gaby laughs in disbelief, rests her forehead against the wall and closes her eyes. He will be the death of her, one way or another. 

Keen to prove her point, Illya palms up her thigh to slip a finger gently into her, the curiosity of before becoming real intent, and slowly builds to the rhythm she usually demands of him. He rolls her clit under his thumb and Gaby’s knee nearly gives out. Knowing, his free arm snakes up around her leg to hold her steady on the mattress.

“Compromise,” he says with a short smile, having gotten his damned wall. Gaby scoffs dizzily until he laps over her with his tongue, and sucks.

Gaby groans, tugging him by his paint-speckled hair. Fondness warms her fiercely. “Th-this compromise. Better than mustard yellow, hm?”

She feels Illya’s grin and huff of a laugh as he pulls her closer. His shoulder is broad and sturdy; she’d melt into a pool in his lap if it weren’t. Pity, she thinks. She does want what’s waiting for her there.

Illya rolls his tongue and he sucks again. He pulses his fingers faultlessly until Gaby gasps out a held breath and curses hard, pressing her burning cheek to the cold wall. She tightens her fist in his hair and nods at nothing at all. A squeak falls out of her throat when he moans back, vibrating over her, with his hand quickening and his mouth drawing an endless wet heat. It keeps coming, far too much and not enough. His eyes, when she dares to look down, are closed, his brow furrowed in concentration. The sight has her let out a whine, tracing over his forehead with the tips of her fingers and marvelling.  A curl of his fingers meets her somewhere bright and perfect and she bucks into it, messy and fraught, shaking, forgetting. Illya redoubles his efforts, stroking that plush curve inside her and lapping, kissing, sucking until-

Gaby cries out his name and pushes herself against him, writhing through the burst of pleasure seeping through her. Illya holds her to him, won’t let up until she breathes out “Illya— Illya, mercy.” She breathes for a moment, flattening her weak hands against the wall. “You—”

She’s down and flat on her back in seconds, smothered by the whole weight of him curving over her body. He hums hot over her pulse point and meets her lips, urgent.  

“Okay?” Illya murmurs, so close it almost buzzes. His hand is still wet with her, trailing up her thighs to part them. He’d taken her down before she could even bemoan the loss, feel anything beyond the blunt shock of her muscles falling to the mattress and the thrum of his skin back on hers. The absence of his fingers aches now, and she rocks her hips to meet him as he settles between her legs.

“Yes,” she groans, snaking her hand between them. “Yes, yes, come on.” She lines him up, just the tip of his cock drawing through the slick, teasing. 

Illya curses hard under his breath.

“You know," she starts, brushing his hair out of his closed eyes,"I want to do that for you." 

Illya stares down at her, pleading, searching. She strokes him until he snaps back to reality. “Next time,” he breathes, losing focus as she pushes a heel into his back.

“Promises, promises.”

It’s a reference of Solo’s and he rolls his eyes at her for it, tugging her up the mattress and away from a stray paintbrush sticking into her shoulder. 

And he fills her up. His sigh and his knitted brow for the first thrust, how his face softens as he rests on her and goes deep and slow, at first, revelling in the sensation of it. She makes a point of tuning in for it. To watch him melt into the lost, mindless fluency of his body, something she can never find in him anywhere but in mid-combat, or while rolling around with her in bed. She kisses him for it and he matches her as best he can.

Focusing, Illya speeds up and she coaxes him on, curling her fingers on his chest and grabbing at the deep dip running between the muscles of his back.

The heat of their bodies together is unreal but her arms are freezing, her legs wrapped around his waist icy where the breeze skitters over them. Illya palms down her thighs to find them prickled with the chill. His effort hasn't warmed his painted hands. 

“You could close the window,” she suggests half-heartedly, wrapping closer around him.

He shakes his hanging head and goes on, deepening the kisses he lays into her neck, curving his back to push into her. He's so much taller it makes touching her where he wants to a challenge. There’s a smirk in his voice regardless. “You will soon warm up.”

“Promises, prom—”

He grumbles something in Russian and rolls over, righting Gaby on top of him with a hurried change of angle that has her cry out and muffle the rest into his skin, hissing with it. 

Illya wraps both arms around her waist and thrusts into her. She sighs a satisfying curse and grabs at his shoulders, sealing any gaps between them, and she lets him work. Here is the heat of his chest, amplified for his arousal in a way that dizzies her. His arms lock around her and she settles her whole weight on him, eager and keyed up for all he has. 

Illya sighs hard over her ear, breath ragged. The bulk of his body is flush under hers and undulating, bucking up hard with his hips. She breaks a sweat, cold to the air but boiling under her skin as he draws deep and shallow in bursts. She’s still raw with sensitivity, but it’s _good_. Every low moan and swell of his chest sparks that too-strong feeling all over again; intense and unreal, like the push of his kiss. His tenderness and his clumsy, hungry grab to get a hold on her, to drive deeper. And the soft stretch of his skin between his shoulders, where he bears so few scars for never turning his back. 

Gaby kisses his throat and it tenses as he swallows, his rhythm becoming erratic, desperate. 

“You’re good,” she murmurs, out of the blue. She grabs onto him and lets him take her waist in both hands until it threatens to bruise, power in his hips and feet planting into the mattress. She tightens around him and shakily kisses his neck again, spreading her lips there and mouthing in German, hoarse and sweet, “Come on, Illya. That’s it, _that’s_ it. _Gott— du Bist so_ — Come on—” 

One of Illya’s hands cups the back of her head and with a groan he does, hard and fast, stilling completely and gritting something out in his native tongue. It's too senseless for Gaby to catch a word. The rest falls out in a heavy breath, a gust that sails over her shoulder blades, tingling.

His face is completely blissed out, mouth immediately parting in search of her. She kisses him, a tired brush of lips on lips, and rests on his chest to catch her breath. She could sink into him like this. Straight into his warm body and through the mattress, a puddle.

She feels his spend slipping down the back of her thigh as he rolls her through it for a little while longer, warm, and wet, and slow. 

When he stills completely, Gaby leans up to check on him. 

His hand splays lower on her back but his eyes are closed, chin tilted to the ceiling. She trails a finger under his chin and down his throat, watches him shiver, waits for the goosebumps to follow.

“Okay?” she echoes.

Illya smiles without opening his eyes. “ _Da_.” 

She has no idea where the pillows are, or the duvet. Peering around, it’s chaos. Likely there are gallons of paint dripping through the floorboards and into the apartment below. Her body feels the same. Formless, careless, a mess. Gaby presses into the white sheet and lets the mattress spring back under her fingers, dazed and sated.

When she looks back up at Illya he seems to be asleep, face soft and his breathing even. His fingertips tracing over the small of her back in concentric patterns is her only clue.

“Illya.”

One eye opens, smile returning.

“You are important to me as well, you know.”

A small time passes before he seems to register it. “Hmm.” He pulls out with a quiet groan and tugs her higher up his body to meet her, kisses her lazily. “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“I know this. You would like me to live with you. Indefinitely.”

“Well. The rent in this borough is very high.”

Illya hums his agreement, sage. “This?” he slips a tired hand along her paint-streaked waist, presses into her there like he’s testing a fruit. “Another compromise. Perhaps I will live here free of charge if we do this often.”

“How confident.” She lays her cheek on his collarbone. “You would get a discount, at best.”

“Hm.”

Gaby pats his chest. “So you will?”

“Hm?”

“You will live with me.”

Illya shifts. She senses him trying to move her, to wriggle out from under her. She does everything she can not to flinch for it. It is a weak thing for her to feel, but it overwhelms.

But he only peers down at her with a pinch of concern, getting in the way of her staring out of the misty window. Reluctantly, she meets his eye. 

“Think about it,” she says.

“I do not have to think about it.” He sweeps over her cheek with his thumb. “The answer is yes.”

Gaby turns her head to look the other way. “Well, that’s all I needed to hear.”

“And now you have heard it.” 

Illya does move then, gentling her onto the mattress and pulling the sheets straight. He finds a pillow and the corner of the duvet, both swept aside in their hurry and likely ruined now by smeared paint, tangled up with the dust sheets. 

Gaby waits for him to come back, armed with the promise of warmth. Stretching out she finds the souvenir t-shirt under her back. She pulls it over her head, untucks her hair to fall over her shoulders again. Now he’ll never be rid of it, remembering this night whenever she wears it. It’s a new souvenir. Protected and absolved.

He gives her a dull little look that says he’s seen right through her, but he lets it go. Flicking off the ceiling light, he comes crawling back over with the bedding in hand. And he lays down with her in the dark, pulling the cold covers on top, fluffing them up for them to float back down weightily.

Gaby sinks back into the single pillow and tugs him with her to share. The press of his body is whole and secure, a vast size and hefty weight of muscle and bone that she has grown accustomed to. Down here, on the floor, it feels as if he could slip off the mattress and into the black. So she edges closer. She scratches through the stubble over his jaw and he lets her, paying more attention to sealing out the chill with military precision, tucking them both in and away from the wintry draught. 

“We could sleep on the sofa.”

“Absolutely not.”

She smirks, rubs his neck where the crick had strained the last time they’d tried that. He would rather suffer the brisk wind whistling through the panes and the fading stink of wet paint than face it again. 

Instead, curling in, Illya tucks the duvet under Gaby’s side and wraps her around him, a thigh over his waist and an arm under his. It takes some shuffling to get comfortable, but she’s glad to stay here with him. He doesn’t protest the t-shirt, and Illya still radiates such warmth. He pulses the smell of sex and clean sweat, her soap, her shampoo, and under it all the dark, honeyed musk of Illya. Tucked under his chin to lean into his chest, he smells of her now, too.  

Gaby pushes her icy feet to his thigh and Illya hisses, slaps her hip.

“The bathroom will be pink,” she tells him through a yawn, but with no weak authority. The quick sting of his hand fades as he palms over her there, soothing.

“I am to paint that as well?”

She nods and stretches back out, splaying her fingers over his face when he glares at her. “We might as well start that tomorrow. At your pace, we may have it finished by Christmas.” 

Illya scoffs under her hand. “You will play this game there, too. Stop me in my work to push me into shower cubicle.”

“And then there’s the sitting room, and the kitchen...”

“I am only one man.”

Gaby hums, musing. “Then perhaps I will hire a decorator.” She guides Illya’s hand down to where, embarrassingly, she’s still sticky and sensitive. “An eager young apprentice who will see to my whole apartment.”

Illya’s nostrils flare and it makes her giddy. She beams at him and slaps his hip with far more power.

He doesn’t flinch. He circles the wrist thrown over his side and yanks it closer, tugging her in and locking her down, as if being enveloped like this could be any sort of punishment.

“Well, goodnight.”

Gaby tries to roll over in his arms but he tightens, constricting, and the curve of his smile brushes just the tip of her nose. She looks up at him, at the fan of his eyelashes on his cheeks, the little white specks of paint which seem, somehow, to have survived his exertion, and which shine at her now in the slim dark. He blinks slow, and warm, and she knows then that even mustard yellow could have worked. 

“See you in the morning,” she murmurs, to make it real.

Illya lays a bite to her cotton-covered shoulder, rumbling consent to painting every room in pinks of every shade.

In the morning.

 

 

 


End file.
